


It Seemed That Out Of Battle I Escaped

by Darth_Cannizard



Category: Joyeux Noël | Merry Christmas (2005)
Genre: Horstebert, M/M, Post-World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:08:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21621985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darth_Cannizard/pseuds/Darth_Cannizard
Summary: Paris 1919. A man visits the Audebert's.
Relationships: Lt Audebert/Lt Horstmayer (Joyeux Noël)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	It Seemed That Out Of Battle I Escaped

**Author's Note:**

  * For [U_Bahnstation](https://archiveofourown.org/users/U_Bahnstation/gifts).



> Your wishes, dear U_Bahnstation, were, it should happen after the war. I thought about what we talked about and had the idea to write a story slightly similar to one of your own. I hope you like my version of it.

She knows him.  
  
Intimately.  
  
She knows the man standing on the stairs leading to her house, looking up at her.  
  


  
It is very cold. The sky is yellow. It is snowing in thick flakes. They whirl around his figure.  
  
It is December 1919 in Paris.

*

There is a part in the heart of her husband which does not belong to her. There is a part in his past that she knows only superficially. This part belongs to this man and not to her.  
  
Camille has told her everything in letters and later personally. Told her more than he probably should have tell her: about the horrors of war, fights, machine-gun fire, the fight in the trenches, dead comrades who lay for weeks in no man's land and decay slowly. Shell shock. Anxiety. Despair. Doubts about the meaning of the war. Doubts about himself.

And he told her also about the peace on Christmas Eve 1914. About the German officer he met back then. About the man whose photograph is in his notebook. The one who’s face her husband drew in the diary over and over again. She recognizes in all this a love that is in no way inferior to Camille's love for her. And she accepts that as an indispensable fact. Without jealousy.

Looking into the soft brown eyes of one Karl Daniel Horstmayer, she feels reassured that her instincts are not deceiving her. This is a good person. Her husband is fortunate to be loved by him and to love him.

*

"How long am I allowed to stay?"  
  
"As long as you want," answers Camille.  
  
"You are welcome here," says Anna.

*

Karl stays for 18 years. And as dark clouds rise on the political horizon, they follow the invitation of General Gordon Mackenzie and leave the continent.

Scotland is beautiful and peaceful.

**Author's Note:**

> The titel is from the poem "Strange Meeting" by Wilfred Owen, a british poet who wrote some of the greatest anti-war poems, who fought in WW1 and died 1 week before the armistice was signed. He was a kind person and a brilliant mind. May he rest in peace.


End file.
